In recent weeks, we've seen a significant number of spam-scams from a domain that is remarkably similar to an official UK government domain, showing that registrars and hosts are failing to identify obviously fraudulent customers. The fraudulent domain name is close enough to the real thing to fool many targets.
The benefits that flow to Google, Bing, etc. from linking to illegal websites are substantial. So are the benefits gained by internet hosts, especially those providing anonymous or anonymising services for a fee (e.g. Cloudflare) and the internet domain registrars that facilitate the purchase and anonymisation of domains by criminals. In this article, we start the list of domains and those who benefit from providing services to them. Registered users can add their own examples of genuinely illegal websites in the comments.
This is a bit weird: criminals have created an Android virus that resides in users' phones and hacks into wifi network routers, then it does devious and harmful things.
We'd expect the young to be involved in hacking and cracking but surprisingly, the young are also widely implicated in a far wider range of offences.
Then again, 'twas always thus.
There's rarely anything new in Spam Scams but the letter that purports to come from "Investigation and Enforcement Services" and carries a (not exactly correct) UK Government Copyright Notice is novel. Read the full mail below.
It was called Avalanche and it was "specifically designed to thwart detection by law enforcement." But co-operation between enforcement agencies in more than 40 countries and private sector participants created a profile of it and that enabled it to be located and taken down. It had facilitated huge harms.
Mahmoud Daher, an employee of The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), has today appeared at Downing Centre Local Court charged that he effected unauthorised access to restricted data and uttering a false document contrary to money laundering, etc. law.
abhi.garg126@outlook.com. Spam him, please. All website scrapers, email harvesters, even those who engage dozens of people in dark rooms in Delhi, get that address. Put it on every mailing list you can find. Bomb it. Block the mailbox. Make Microsoft...
A hoax article (it's not satire, it's simply a click-bait false story) in online magazine guard1an.com demonstrates why registrars must take steps to limit and even ban the use of names that are sufficiently similar to established names to prevent a wider harm, says Nigel Morris-Cotterill, author of Cleaning up the 'Net: An Action Plan to combat the use and abuse of the internet for financial crime
It's taken a while but Facebook has faked concern over the TimeLine debacle - basically it now has a three column layout: the stuff you want to post; the stuff FB wants to publicise about you and the stuff others want to pester you with. Firefox users have had some fixes but this one is the best yet.
US listed Wireless Matrix Corporation has agreed to sell all of the shares of its wholly-owned subsidiary Wireless Matrix USA Inc. It's what happens next that's interesting.
An Australian Court is the latest to say that a US headquartered company cannot refuse to produce information as to users who post defamatory statements. This time it's Google's "Blogger" / "Blogspot" service.
For all the criticism (mainly from the USA, it has to be said) of China's approach to the internet, there are actually lessons that the anarchic world of the global internet can learn. One is a stellar initiative from the Beijing Police.
It's a dream, a bad dream. I'm standing on a street corner, it's late, it's dark, I know my location but I don't know where I am. There are figures in the shadows. I am not comfortable. I decide to call a cab and I reach into my pocket, pick up my phone, the latest model from a leading manufacturer, click to wake it up - but it's dead. And it's only six hours since I unplugged it from the USB cable that it spends most of its life attached to in the office. It might still be a cellphone, but it's hardly mobile, says Pete Jackson.
Hot on the heels of Facebook's decision to reduce user's ability to hide their public profile comes the commercial reason why: Facebook is testing a system that will enable non-contacts to send messages to users if they pay USD1. Thanks for the spam but will users be allowed to say "No thanks?" And will FB breach the Can Spam Act and, even, risk the company and its officers being prosecuted for money laundering?
